Introduction
OUP UNCORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Sep 19 2020, NEWGEN C& Introduction Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston C&.P' What is grand strategy? What does it aim to achieve? Does it have relevance— and, if so, applicability—beyond questions of war and peace? And what di!erentiates it from normal strategic thought— what, in other words, makes it “grand”? C&.P( In recent years, historians and other scholars have o!ered useful de"nitions, most of which coalesce around the notion that grand strategy is an ampli"cation of the “normal” strategic practice of deploying various means to attain speci"c ends.1 “#e crux of grand strategy,” writes Paul Kennedy, co- founder of the in$uential Grand Strategy program at Yale University, “lies . in policy, that is, in the capacity of the nation’s leaders to bring together all the elements, both military and nonmilitary, for the preservation and enhancement of the nation’s long-term (that is, in war- time and peacetime) best interests.”2 John Lewis Gaddis, the program’s co- founder with Kennedy, de"nes grand strategy succinctly as “the align- ment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabil- ities.”3 Hal Brands, an alumnus of Yale’s program and a contributor to this volume, observes that grand strategy is best understood as an “intellectual architecture that lends structure to foreign policy; it is the logic that helps states navigate a complex and dangerous world.”4 Peter Feaver, who followed Yale’s model when establishing a grand strategy program at Duke University, is somewhat more speci"c: “Grand strategy refers to the collection of plans and policies that comprise the state’s deliberate e!ort to harness political, military, diplomatic, and economic tools together to advance that state’s na- tional interest.”5 International Relations theorist Stephen Walt is even more precise: “A state’s grand strategy is its plan for making itself secure.
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